Re: Spinlock performance improvement proposal

On Wed, 26 Sep 2001, D. Hageman wrote:

> Oh, man ... am I reading stuff into what you are writing or are you
> reading stuff into what I am writing? Maybe a little bit of both? My
> original contention is that I think that the best way to get the full
> potential out of SMP machines is to use a threads model. I didn't say the
> present way wasn't fast.
Or alternatively, that the current inter-process locking is a bit
inefficient. Its possible to have inter-process locks that are as fast as
inter-thread locks.

> > Actually, if I remember, there was someone who ported postgresql (I think
> > it was 6.5) to be multithreaded with major pain, because the requirement
> > was to integrate with CORBA. I believe that person posted some benchmarks
> > which were essentially identical to non-threaded postgres...
>
> Actually, it was 7.0.2 and the performance gain was interesting. The
> posting can be found at:
>
> 7.0.2 About 10:52 average completion
> multi-threaded 2:42 average completion
> 7.1beta3 1:13 average completion
>
> If the multi-threaded version was 7.0.2 and threads increased performance
> that much - I would have to say that was a bonus. However, the
> performance increases that the PostgreSQL team implemented later ...
> pushed the regular version ahead again. That kinda says to me that
> potential is there.
Alternatively, you could read that 7.1 took the wind out of threaded
sails. :) But I guess we won't know until the current version is ported to
threads...

-alex